Doing small, random things and giving a nice and personal Christmas gift would be normal for someone who is crazy about a person. One doesn’t have to choose between doing one or the other, except maybe for financial reasons. So the woman would not know that there was a choice between (a) small things all the time or (b) grand gesture, or that this was something to be negotiated. It doesn’t look here like she was the one withholding information.
It wasn’t a choice between one or the other. If I could have thought of a grand gesture that I knew she would like, I’d have done it. She had three children, a brother, and one of her parents was still alive, so I’m sure her calendar was already pretty full at Christmas time. Should I have cooked for her, taken her to a fancy restaurant, planned a weekend getaway? Maybe she wanted some down time after all the family pressures of the holidays. I thought of getting a necklace, but she didn’t wear much jewelry, and she made some of it herself. I also got her some beads that were on her Amazon wishlist. I just didn’t want her to think that because I didn’t break the bank in December that I didn’t care about her. I did other things for her that took time, skill, and effort, and that meant a lot to me, I just didn’t wait 'til December to do them.
And again, the reason she dropped me may have had nothing at all to do with Christmas presents.
I’m not sure what data that one has. I did find this article which claims on tinder the top 78% of women compete for the top 20% of men.
Stuff like that makes incels despondent because 80% of men can’t be in the best looking 20%. And even if they practice self improvement, they are just competing for women who themselves don’t have to improve. The idea of becoming fit, athletic and wearing great clothes plus having a handsome face and a good job, all to be good enough to date out of shape single mothers with debt is depressing for a lot of guys. So they give up and get resentful.
Lots of incels look at things like that (for one they can’t be in the top 20% realistically, and being in the top 20% is relative so as other guys improve, your position drops. But even if they could be in the top quintile of looks it just means they are good enough for unremarkable women with oversized demands), get depressed and angry and give up. They feel their is no winning move for them. Either be invisible to women, or constantly self improve on an endless treadmill you will probably never win just to be good enough for women with unrealistic demands. At root that is how a lot of incels feel about dating.
I see I have a lot of work to do to overcome skepticism here. Sex robots are a developing technology. As time goes on and sex robots get better and better at approximating human intimacy, I believe they will be recognized as a bona fide therapeautic aide. Animal assisted therapy already exists and we have research showing its effectiveness.
PARO: Therapeutic robot baby seal for people with dementia.
If a robotic animal can provide comfort to elderly dementia patients, is it really so crazy to speculate that a robotic human could be therapeautic?
Generally speaking, the Incel community consists of young able bodied straight white males. In addition to having obnoxious personalities, they don’t tick off any of the “sympathy categories” of either the Right or the Left. But what about the disabled? The elderly? Transgendered? The overweight? The autistic? Lots of people have conditions through no fault of their own that make them unlikely to find a romantic partner. They aren’t all just misogynistic hatemongers who cheer mass murderers online.
The key here is that you’re comparing dementia patients to men who presumably have all their cognitive faculties.
Not from what I can tell. Representation from ethnic and racial minorities seems pretty high to me on those boards, despite the pervasive racism.
I dont know why they assume women aren’t under the same pressure to improve. I mean, going by their own 80/20 logic, you have a ton of women going after a small fraction of men. That translates into a lot of women trying to be the slimmest, prettiest, and sweetest. And the math also says most of these women—a good many who are perfectly attractive—will not be successful in snagging a top 20% guy. So the conclusion that only horrid obese single moms are left behind for them is stupid.
The Internet is probably not the best way for a incel to meet women because its a visual medium, and women often need more than a couple of pics to be interested in someone (unless the guy is exceptionally good looking). Instead of fixating on Tinder and Okcupid data, they need to be trying to find ways to socialize in meat space.
You know who else ticks more sympathy boxes? Victims of racial and class-based discrimination. The long-term unemployed. People who are struggling to afford medication and health care. People with serious mental health issues that aren’t being properly treated. Poor people trying to escape the inner city or rural hellholes. Folks burdened by heavy student loan debt. Folks who are suffering from drug addiction.
All of these groups are in the queue for societal compassion and assistance. Some of them have been waiting for decades. Horny guys who can’t get laid are just going to have to wait for their turn. In the meantime, they can make do with their hands and all the free porn out there.
I think this country would be really screwed up if it started prioritizing sex robots over universalizing healthcare. Let’s do that first, at least.
I suffer from being obnoxious. Shouldn’t the taxpayer pay for remedial robots to coddle my ego? (It’s hardly my fault I’m obnoxious: it was the deterministic outcome of the the zigs and zags on life’s rocky path … and/or genes.)
If you reread my post, you’ll see the vacation was to jar you out of your rut, to have an adventure and to take a fresh look at yourself and your social skills. Any sex would be just a fringe benefit.
You must be sad and dismal if you’re willing to concede that a sex robot is your best option.
Artificial Intelligence is getting better and better.
Some of the strongest skepticism I’ve seen in this thread is coming from women. I think women have more sophisticated tastes in partners than men, generally speaking. From a perspective of evolutionary psychology, a woman is attracted first and foremost to a man’s behavior, not his body. An attractive body is definitely a plus, but it’s not the primary trait that she looks for. She wants a man who has some degree of social status, so he can provide resources for any future offspring. This is going to be more difficult for a robot to emulate.
The primary thing that a man looks for in a woman is a beautiful body. Personality is a secondary consideration. Not irrelevant, but not as important. I realize that this statement may make a lot of women uncomfortable, but I believe it to be true. I don’t believe that a robot has to pass the Turing Test to satisfy most men.
It might be true for you, and for many others. Maybe when I was 20 I thought this was true for me. It’s not true for me any more, and not true for many other men.
Considering the incredible variety in human mating behaviors – in some cultures the men “pretty themselves” to attract women, in others the women “pretty themselves”… in some cultures the male partner moves into his wife’s family’s house, and in others, the female partner moves into her husband’s family’s house, and much, much more – culture has far, far more influence on our inclinations and behaviors than biological drives (which, in my understanding, do little more than tell us which gender(s) we are attracted to).
My advice to any man who puts stock in “evolutionary psychology”? Don’t. It’s not doing you any favors, is largely a bunch of just-so stories, and tells you nothing you need to know to start to form connections to real people.
Thank you.
While correlation doesn’t equal causation, it certainly seems like men who most often espouse evolutionary psych theories also are the ones struggling the most romantically. Makes suspect that their fixed mindset about human behavior causes them to interact with women in off-putting ways.
A prime example = telling women what they find attractive.
Relationships are work. Quite a bit of work, in fact. It is all about anticipating the other’s needs without needing to be told to do so. That’s hard to do. And I don’t think that you have to anticipate all their needs, that’s just getting into either creepy territory or a very unhealthy co-dependency. But anticipating some of their needs some of the time can go a long way to maintaining the relationship, towards making them know that you care and are not just taking them for granted.
I’m not very good at that, myself. I consider someone expecting me to anticipate their needs without them telling me what they are to be a form of passive aggression, and I get resentful over it. I am always very clear on communicating what my expectations are, and get a bit annoyed when someone tries to go above that and “anticipate” my needs. I get that that is a normal function of many healthy relationships, but that is probably why I don’t have many of those.
As far as your story of the guy accepting the divorce, I can completely understand that. That’s how my break-ups have always been. They decide that we aren’t going to be together anymore, and I say, “Okay.” The last thing in the world that I need or want is a fight with a person for the purpose of keeping that person in my life, that just doesn’t make any sense to me.
And this is what makes the idea of handing out sex robots concerning to me. A socially inept individual will relate to a robot better than another person. But rather than encouraging that socially inept individual to stretch himself and learn strategies for dealing his challenges, we’ll set him up with a device that will almost certainly take away any remnant desire to connect with another person and in doing so, probably cause him to lose any of the social skills he may have. And now instead of a mildly socially inept person–someone who could be helped through therapy and medication and just general life experience–we’ll have a severely social inept person. He may be happy with his lot, but if he loses his ability to cope with normal, everyday human interactions, then where is the benefit to society?
Yes, there are some miserable guys out there who are tired of beating their meat while watching the pretty girls flock to “Chads”. But misery can be a great motivator for personal growth. And while a 40-something guy who is “granted” a sex robot might be mature enough to not lose his marbles over it, what about a 19-year-old? Would it even be responsible for the government to deem a 19-year-old an “incel”, knowing that once that kid gets his government-subsidized sex robot, there’s likely no going back for him? In my opinion, the government should be not advocating any interventions that promote or entrench asociality, since asociality does not benefit society.
No.
The problem with self-identified “incels” is generally not “no woman will have sex with me”. Anyone still willingly wearing that label at this point has problems that go far deeper than merely “no woman wants to have sex with me”. I mean, that ideology is pretty openly antisocial in a large number of ways, and the problem isn’t simply the lack of pair bonding (which I will gladly accept as a valid need - I feel like responses like septimus’s are unhelpful here, as social isolation is, in fact, really really shitty for the person who is isolated). The issues go deeper than that.
Based on what you wrote about men being okay with simply a beautiful body, what would it matter if AI is improving?
You can’t really compare therapeutic robo baby seals marketed to dementia patients with robots intended to be realistic stand-ins for women for physiologically healthy men. It would relatively easy to make a robo seal cute and charming enough to comfort someone who half the time can’t even recognize themselves in the mirror. It will be harder to design a robot that sufficiently mimics a real woman and in such a way that it can maintain a man’s long term interest.
If you believe your own theories, can I ask whether you own a Real Doll? Seems to me rather than waiting empty-handed until these robots come out, you would already have at least invested in the next best thing.
Because a woman with a beautiful body AND personality is better than a woman with simply a beautiful body and no personality. But I’d rather have the latter than no partner at all.
If I had $5000, I’d buy one in a heartbeat. I probably will in the next 3 years or so.